SHEILA HETI’S FIRST novel, Ticknor, was tiny and at first glance rambling—but in fact, beautifully composed and orchestrated. In it, she told the story of real-life author George Ticknor’s life through his own obsessive mental cycles as he walks to a dinner party thrown by the subject of the biography he has written. The book was a satire on nineteenth-century biography and an exploration of a twisted and self-flagellating psyche. It was also a stylish experiment in literary form. The fact that a major newspaper assigned a review of it in 2006 to me, then a semi-employed magazine intern, said plenty about the status of Canadian fiction in the United States, or perhaps of experimental literary fiction generally.
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